Because if half his nose is covered, and he can’t see—well, for me it would just mean a greater rush. But I’m in the habit of throwing myself off things. He’s not. Fuck.
E hits the water with a splash. A belly flop into the rapids.
And now he’s winded. Fuck.
At first Petal and Mark laugh; but then I point, and they notice how he’s not struggling against the current. It’s Mark’s yell that splits the air, rips the blue sky in two, and drops the clouds around our heads.
The world crashes.
“Shit. What have we done? What have we done?” Petal says. “Fuck. I can’t believe we did this again.”
I think she’s referring to Amy, but I’m not sure.
What aren’t they telling me?
Can’t focus on that now.
I tear off my jacket and stand up on the edge of the bridge. I pinch my nose, because that’s how they always do it in the movies. And then I jump before Mark and Petal can grab me.
I fall like a vertical bullet. I’m expecting a memory to hit me, but nothing comes.
I crash into the river, my feet feeling as if they’ve shattered upon impact.
Cold and strong, the water surges around me. It doesn’t take long for my feet to touch the muddy bottom.
I swallow my disappointment at not finding a memory and struggle up to the surface, struggle for breath, even though it would be so easy to let the water put me to sleep.
I can see E floating along with the current. It’s a steady flow, but this river’s washed out. It’s not strong enough to make his limbs as useless as a puppet’s. He might be in shock or something. Not being able to see or breathe right probably isn’t helping.
Stroke, stroke, stroke. I speed up the current’s flow. I’m beside him in what’s not quite a minute, not quite a moment. Three heartbeats’ time, Amy and I used to call it. But my heart’s beating so fast, thudding bruises against my chest.
E’s breathing bubbles, all of his air streaming out of him into the water. I put a hand on his shoulder. When that doesn’t get his attention, I grab his head and pull him out of the water. He sucks in a deep breath and then the weight of his head, complete with soggy hair, becomes too much for me and I drop it again.
Bubbles in the water. White rushing above us.
White noise. White sound and fury.
My limbs are giving out. What’s the point?
But I give it one last shot and pluck at the knot I tied in the scarf. It floats away, and I can see it from the corner of my eye. A pink dream, lost in the water.
I pull E and myself up for another breath, but as soon as we’re down again he becomes a dead weight. I swim under him, trying to make eye contact, to threaten him into moving. But his eyes are closed. His skin is loose, his features slack. Unconscious.
Shit. There’s no way I can force him to breathe for long enough. Acting as his personal ventilator is not going to work.
I need him to move fast.
I twist down in the water, spin my way through the current until I’m underneath him, and aim my knee at his pants. Bubbles spurt from my mouth. In this weird gravity, with my limbs floating everywhere, it looks something like ballet to me.
Who’d have thought that kneeing someone in the balls could ever be equated with beauty?
I’d like to say that my ballet-balls threat is what forces Explosive Boy to finally lift his body from the water, but I’m pretty sure he’s still out cold.
Truth? The water releases us from its embrace. Cold mud slicks my back, and suddenly we aren’t moving anymore. Suddenly, the sun is glaring at me and I’m not quite as wet.
E’s eyes sludge open. He turns over, lifts himself off me—because with the water whooshing out from between us, he’s practically on top of me. He sucks in sunshine and air.
I laugh. Triumph always makes me laugh. Living again and again and again always makes me laugh. But when I laugh, water shoots into my mouth and nose. It floods my lungs. The sun is so bright, and I can’t help but think I’m dying.
I’m dying in a fucking puddle. On a sunny day.
I’ve one-upped Amy. She’s going to be so pissed at me in heaven, or hell, or reincarnation. Wherever.
I splutter. Air slides into my mouth and nose in trickles. I hear voices above me, feel arms under me; but I’m just not getting enough air, and I sink into blackness.
Chapter Ten
AMY AND PET and I are sitting at the kitchen table.
Amy drinks her punch as if she’s downing a shot and then scoops more out of the bowl we’ve hijacked.
“Let’s play twenty questions,” she says. “Every time you reveal something totally tragic about yourself, knock back some punch.” She grins, golden skin lit by the soft light from the other room. “We all know it’s spiked.”
Because she spiked it.
Mark dances into the kitchen. He opens my fridge and grabs a beer. “What are you guys up to?”
“Twenty questions,” I say. “You?”
“Some girl just offered to give me a striptease.”
“Well, go have fun then,” Amy says. She drinks half her punch in one gulp.
“Nah, Ames. I’ll skip it for you, ’cause I’m a good boyfriend that way.”
He takes a seat next to her, slings an arm around her shoulder. She squirms, as if she wants to push him away, then she settles, drinks more punch.
Pet sets out the ground rules. “So I’ll ask a question and whoever I ask answers, and then they get to ask their victim of choice something.” She’s already tipsy. Her words blur into one another, blend into the crashing music that thump-thump-thumps in the next room. “Amy, you can keep count. When everyone’s answered twenty questions, game’s over.”
She starts with me. Lucky number one.
“Why’re you such a bitch, Ella?”
She didn’t have to wait until I was playing a game to ask this.
“When I was in grade school, there was this kid who used to pinch me every day. She sat next to me, and she’d call me ugly and shit. And then one day I just got sick of it. She had a Coke in her bag. And I slipped my hand into the bag and shook up the soda so, so, so hard. It exploded. I guess that’s when it started.”
I guess. But I’m not quite sure. I’ll never be quite sure. Because when I look back sometimes, it seems as if I’ve just always been this way. And then other times it feels as if I’ve never been this way. As if I’m not a bitch, no matter how much people tell me I am.
Outspoken, maybe. Harsh, maybe. Bitch? Not quite there.
I shrug away the thoughts. “Maybe bitchiness is just in my blood. I mean, my mom’s a huge bitch. So it could be genetic.”
Amy meets my gaze. Red clouds the whites of her eyes. She gulps down more punch. What’s the point of playing for drinks if Amy’s going to keep downing them?
She wants to get wasted. I can see it in the arrows pulling down from the corners of her mouth.
“It’s weird that you can pinpoint a certain event like that,” Amy says.
I shrug. No need to tell her I’m not sure that’s the event that actually triggered it.
My fingers tighten around my glass of punch. Suddenly, my mouth is parched. I wait for someone to give me the go-ahead, though—because drinking games are no fun if everyone drinks, anyway.
“That was a punch-worthy answer,” Pet declares.
I scoop some punch into my cup and drink it all at once. It slides down my throat, a cool burn. “Right. Your turn, Ames. What did you think of me when you first met me?”
“A lot of things.” She shifts in her seat, looking uncomfortable. Drunk and uncomfortable. Oh, god, whatever her answer is, it’s going to be so good that it’s bad.
“Like what?”
She sighs and buries her head in her hands. Dark strands of hair straggle into her cup of punch, floating in the barely-there light that filters in from the party. “Okay, so you have to know that I don’t think this anymore. I don’t, really. But back then
I thought you were just that perfect girl. You know? The one everyone hates secretly but pretends to love. Because, come on, Ella, you have to admit that you look the part.”
I give her the finger. “Drink some punch. Or I’m going to punch you.”
Eight years, she’s been one of my best friends. By now she must have realized that I’m far from perfect.
“Your turn, Marquis.” Amy’s been calling Mark that for the past couple of weeks. She’s developed a thing for French novels or something. “So, if you could change one thing about your life, what would it be?”
“I’d have a hippie van instead of my crappy car.”
“Be serious.” She leans across the table, long limbs slightly lazy, slightly out of control. “Be serious,” she repeats.
“Okay,” he says. “Um. I don’t know what I’d change, to be honest. I screw stuff up a lot; but to tell you the truth, I kinda like it that way.”
I just keep staring at my punch. I wanted Mark to say that he’d give up the drugs if he could have had it any other way. Because his using went far beyond recreational last year, and it was fucking scary.
Something snaps, shattering glass, behind Amy’s eyes. She looks away.
Petal laughs loud, because she’s too drunk to even notice the tension. “Me, too.”
“Your turn.” Mark grins at her. “Who was your first kiss?”
This is a traditional question for Pet. We ask it every time. Every fucking time, and it still doesn’t matter; the answer is still hilarious.
Petal wrinkles her nose. “Andy Burgerman.”
“More like Booger Man,” I say. He was this fat kid, famous for picking his nose.
We all shriek with laughter except Amy. She was a fat kid, too, all the way through middle school. People used to tease her. The words of school kids twined into the insults her parents were constantly throwing her way, and she fell apart.
Her fat dropped away as we went through middle school, and so did her spirit. She’s gotten it back—her spirit—in the past couple of years. But she doesn’t get that I’d love her, we’d love her, either way. Fat or thin or green and blob shaped.
It still hits her hard when we laugh at Booger Man. Because she imagines other kids, at some other kitchen table, putting their heads together and laughing about her.
And that thought makes me sick about what I’ve just said. I notice Mark’s fingers curling around Amy’s shoulder.
“I’m going to screw up the order,” Pet says. Amy’s quiet, staring at one of her black curls floating in the pink punch. She fishes it out and takes a sip. Punch spiked with vodka, and Essence of Amy.
She shakes her head, flicks away the bad thought. A few drops of punch still linger in that lock of hair.
“Back to you, Mark,” Petal says.
He makes a face at her.
“What do you least want to admit to everyone at this table? Go around in order. What’s the weirdest thing you’ve thought about Ella, Ames, and me?”
He turns to me and says, “Ella, in the seventh grade I had this dream about you.”
“Stop right there! I don’t want to hear about your horny seventh-grade dreams.”
He laughs. “No, don’t worry; it wasn’t one of those dreams. You were riding a horse and singing ‘Thriller’ in a really high-pitched voice. And that’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever thought about you.”
“That’s not too bad,” I say. “But because you heard me singing ‘Thriller’ in your sleep; I think you need this.” I grab a glass of punch and fill it. “Drink up.”
He drinks and whoops, because he’s Mark and that’s what he does. “And you, Petal,” he says. “You. Well, there was that time I thought you were considering becoming a stripper. Do you remember that?”
She slaps him lightly. “I do. But you were high, so I forgive you, my favorite stoner.”
“Shut up. I’m not a stoner anymore.”
“What about me?” Amy leans forward. Hair sliding into the pink punch again. Half submerged.
“You.” Mark’s voice drops. His words are a whisper in the dark, splashing into the punch. “I—I used to think that I liked you better when you were fat.”
The hair slides farther into the punch. Three-quarters gone.
Chapter Eleven
SOMEONE’S POUNDING THEIR fist against my chest. Bitch. Water rockets up through me, and I make sure to spurt it all into Petal’s face.
I turn on my side and cough and splutter and choke the river water out onto the grass.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
My skin is wet. My clothes are wet. My throat is on fire. The wind whips through the sun-speckled grass and I feel it.
I’m alive.
The rush, the high from before I passed out, still lingers in my body. It will take a long time to go, fade out slowly, evaporate with the water that drips from my clothes.
And I got a memory back, too. I can feel myself smiling, my wet skin stretching as far as it can go.
I got a memory back. And finally, it’s about us. Me, Mark, Pet, Amy.
My smile fades as I think about the conversation. I look for Mark, find his blue-green eyes. “You liked Amy better when she was fat,” I manage to wheeze out.
It’s understandable. I mean, her methods of losing weight were questionable. Yo-yo dieting. Bulimia. Sometimes I hated Thin Amy, too. I hated her for what she was doing to herself. I hated her for making me watch.
And I hate my memory for taking me back to that, because it’s not something I want to think about. Because it forces me to admit that Amy wasn’t just a beautiful, reckless hurricane of a girl.
That when she laughed her head off and convinced us to break into a supermarket at midnight so that we could do cart wheelies, her arms were as skinny as sticks. Brittle, breakable bone.
Her mind was breaking. Her heart, too.
And I never did anything.
We. Never. Did. Anything.
And I’m thinking about this, and my head’s getting all dizzy, and Mark’s still looking down at me. Looking as if he’s seen a ghost.
The color drains from his face. “What?” he says. “What are you talking about?”
Oh yeah, Mark’s hiding something. If he wasn’t, he’d have laughed it off. Or he’d have cried and attempted to explain what he’d meant. Avoiding the subject: Usually only done when there’s something to cover up.
My eyelids are still heavy with water, so I can’t narrow my eyes.
Petal’s hand finds mine. She pulls me to my feet with strength that a five-foot-two girl shouldn’t have. “I have the gnome,” she says, pressing it into my hand.
I love that it’s no longer a big deal when one of us nearly dies. I love that Pet knew to bring the gnome for me, even though she hates my obsession with it. I love that this last piece of memory I retrieved was longer than all the other snippets, all the other flashes of that night.
I hate that I know they’re lying for sure now. I hate that they’re lying at all.
I close my eyes. Breaths tear through my chest. Ragged, broken sounds that spill into the water and flow away downstream. The gnome refs. I open my eyes, meet the gnome’s. So how’d I do?
The answer: not so well. Because, guess what? I just realized that I’ve been lying, too. To myself, is what’s worse.
I’ve been pretending that Amy was perfectly fine. That everything was A-OK before she died, and it’s her death that’s fucked everything up.
Truth: Amy was screwed up before that night.
Truth: everyone was drifting before that night.
Truth: I was not, am not, the good friend I’m pretending to be in my head.
My heart is still hammering in my rib cage. Erratic, wild, rock ’n’ roll drumbeat. I’m horribly conscious of how loud my breathing is.
And oh, my god, I’m crazy, because I can almost see the gnome nodding along with me.
I hug the gnome to my chest. Cry for Amy. Silent tears that no one sees, because my face
is wet and a few more drops of salt water don’t really make a difference.
“Let’s get out of here,” Mark says, his voice firm, decisive.
Petal pulls me to my feet. Mark’s already walking off, loping through the weeds with the rangy grace of a mountain lion. I’m about to follow him when Explosive Boy says, “Wait.” He runs after Mark, grabs him, spins him around.
“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?”
Mark raises his eyebrows. “Away from you.”
Explosive Boy laughs, shakes his head. God. I swear I can see steam rolling from the ends of his hair. “No way,” he says. “No way are you walking away from me after you pushed me off a fucking bridge. No way.”
E’s whole body is trembling. He always looks as if he’s about to turn into a bonfire, but this is the first time I’ve really seen him ablaze. His fists curl and uncurl.
Mark notices and gives him a mocking smile. He does a few uppercuts and hops from foot to foot. “I may be a hippie, but I like my boxing classes, too.”
Bullshit. Absolute bullshit. Whatever Mark knows about boxing he learned from watching the initial scenes of Billy Elliot. And even then, the ballet’s more his forte.
Explosive Boy seems to have called Mark’s bluff, because he takes a step toward him. Mark steps back, but he doesn’t look worried. “Come on, E,” Mark says. “You can’t seriously have thought Pick Me Ups were going to be a tea party.”
“You,” E says, stepping through a clump of weeds, “are a dickhead.”
Mark says something in reply, but I don’t hear him because I’m still caught in the moment where E stepped through the weeds.
Amy died in a patch of weeds.
Suddenly, all my brain can think is that Amy’s face is under E’s foot. Her soft lips kissing the damp earth. I feel the ground on my own lips, my own face. Dirt, leaves, and a rubber sole pressing against my skin. Sealing off my mouth.
I hate my imagination.
My breaths sputter all over the place. Petal puts a hand on my back. “Okay,” she says. “You’re okay.”
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